The Amalfi Coast is beach clubs, high fashion, and five stars. But it’s also small, family-run farms, ancient mountain tracks, and hearty home-cooked meals. We join Explore Worldwide to see a side of Amalfi that you don’t always get to see, step by step (by step, by step).
“It’s not stairs; it’s just a flat area divided,” says our tour guide, Gaia Gargiulo, deadpan and fully convinced by her own rationalising. Only a local—from nearby Piano di Sorrento, to be exact—could be so blasé about the prospect of climbing yet another flight of rugged stone steps.
Our 16-strong group on the Explore Worldwide lets out a collective laugh-groan, both amused by Gargiulo’s earnest attempts at minimising the enormity of the task ahead and dreading the inevitable jelly legs post-climb. We’re only about 1km into the second scheduled walk of our eight-day Amalfi Coast walking tour with Explore Worldwide, and we’ve already climbed near the equivalent of the Empire State Building.
Going “up, up, up, up”, as Gaia so casually puts it, is part and parcel of this trip; there’s no other option when the Amalfi Coast is all dramatic cliffs and valleys. Over the course of eight days, we cover a total of 46km, stopping in at Amalfi, Positano, Ravello, and Capri, amongst other lesser-known villages and towns in the region.
It’s a fair effort on our part, but putting in the work results in ample reward for us. There are celebratory spritz stops when we reach the peak of our climbs, unparalleled mountain and coastal views to keep us moving towards the finish line, and hearty homemade meals waiting for us back at base.
We’re staying at Luna D’Agerola, an agriturismo (farm) in the quaint mountaintop village of San Lazzaro. It’s not fancy by any means, but what it lacks in glamour, it more than makes up for in its wholesomeness. Three siblings—Giovanna, Ferdinando, and Valentino—and one of the trio’s high school-aged sons live at and run the farm stay. It’s a big family affair, and, at 7am each morning, you can even find the farm’s matriarch, Nonna Maria, out working the cornfields.
Maria’s call time is an hour earlier than ours, with our daily group briefings taking place at 8am over a simple breakfast of fruit, cereal, and home-baked cake. It’s in these briefings that Gaia lays out the Explore Worldwide tour plan for the day, carefully tracing our proposed path over a topographic map of the peninsular.
Yesterday, she traced our first walk, a 5km ‘warm-up’ from Bomerano back to San Lazzaro. The tracing of our second walk squiggles its way from the heart of Amalfi and up the Lattari Mountains to Ravello before heading all the way back down again via Italy’s smallest town by square meterage, Atrani.
It takes us around two hours to climb the 1,700 ancient steps up the edge of the mountain from Amalfi to Ravello. In all that time, we see only a handful of other people on the trail: a few locals on their way down and two tradies with their train of working mules.
At one point, we’re forced to find refuge in the scrub to let the animals pass, their agility and speed on the steps putting us to shame. By the time we reach the peak, it’s lunchtime, and Ravello is buzzing with hungry visitors.
We bypass the busy town centre via a cobblestoned laneway, landing at Hotel Villa Maria’s sprawling cliffside alfresco. It’s a lunch spot we wouldn’t have otherwise found if it weren’t for the recommendation of our in-the-know guide, Gaia. Local fried pizza and octopus and potato salads are just the refuelling we need before tackling the downhill towards Atrani, where the pebbled beach and €3 mini bottles of Prosecco await.
With a range of abilities and pace in the group, we find ourselves splitting into two groups on many of the walks; one going cuoncio cuonc’ (Neapolitan for ‘slowly slowly’) and pacing themselves alongside Gaia, the other taking a walkie-talkie and setting a blistering speed up front.
Being a part of the latter group has its benefits, like making it to ‘Gerry’s Pub’ in Pogerola, a tiny village with a population of 500, with an extra 15 minutes up our sleeves. After five hours traversing the woodlands and valleys of Ferriere Nature Reserve on our longest walk yet (day five’s San Lazzaro to Amalfi), the extra time on the pub’s balcony is the perfect prep for the descent back into Amalfi’s chaos.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a walking tour of the Amalfi Coast without taking the region’s most popular trail, the 11km Path of the Gods. It’s our final walk of the tour and the busiest, with more people on this track than we’ve seen on all the other tracks combined.
Given the spectacular view down the coastline from Positano to Capri, it’s not hard to see why foot traffic here is so heavy. We leave the main path and deviate towards a shepherd’s house. Gaia knows the owner Antonio well, and he welcomes us to have a snack on his terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. In true Italian style, his hospitality is warm and energetic, and the tambourines, guitar, and triccheballacche (a Neapolitan folk instrument) come out for a lively singalong to ‘Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu)’. It’s the perfect tune to send us off on our final few kilometres of the 8-day walking tour.
*All images by Monique Ceccato.
Explore Worldwide’s 8-day Amalfi Coast walking tour visits Amalfi, Positano, Capri, and the small towns and villages in between. Tour season runs from April to November, with prices starting from $2,890 per person (twin share). Explore Worldwide is currently offering a Europe Early Bird Sale for trips departing 2025. Sale ends 26 September, 2024.
The writer Monique Ceccato was hosted by Explore Worldwide as a guest.
